Peter Gibbons
Biographic Data
| ID | 83393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Gibbons |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Gibbons |
| SIGNATURE | GIBBONS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | ResearchFellow,ScandinavianInstituteOfAfricanStudies,PoBox1703,Uppsala,75147,Sweden |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 796 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Firm profitability and forced wage labour in Portuguese Africa
Forced wage labour (FWL) in colonial-era Portuguese Africa came to encompass a majority of working age men and persisted until the early 1960s. On the basis of reconstructed financial records from the Sena Sugar Estates in today's Mozambique, we estimate the long-run profitability of the firm. With this we associate rates of extraction from native labour, defined as the difference between actual levels of remuneration and those under counterfactu…
Lineages of Paternalism
This introductory paper argues that, for most of the period since 1914, paternalism has been the most enduring influence over labour management in large-scale agriculture in Africa and South-East Asia. On the other hand, paternalism appears in a number of variants, with considerable differences in terms of protagonists, degrees of comprehensiveness, emphases and relations to alternative approaches to labour management. After a brief preliminary s…
Labour Management on Contemporary Kenyan Cut Flower Farms
This paper describes the labour management system applied since around 2005 on farms accounting for the bulk of the output of the Kenyan cut flower sector, and provides an analysis of the foundations of this system. Using categories drawn from convention theory, this system is characterized in terms of specific approaches to hiring, training and promotion; labour retention; work organization and worker deployment; payment systems and supervision,…
A New System of Labour Management in African Large-Scale Agriculture
This paper applies a convention theory (CT) approach to the analysis of labour management systems in African large-scale farming. The reconstruction of previous analyses of high-value crop production on large-scale farms in Africa in terms of CT suggests that, since 1980-95, labour management has moved from a 'domestic' to a 'market' system. However, data collected by the authors from a sample of 11 large-scale rose farms in Kenya in 2011 (coveri…
A Standard Fit for Neoliberalism
Social scientists and historians writing on techniques of contemporary rule, particularly those influenced by post-Marxist paradigms such as governmentality, have become increasingly preoccupied by the expanding role of standardization and the subjection of an ever-expanding array of spheres of activity to inspection (or self-inspection), audit, and certification. In the course of their investigations, the elements of a common narrative are emerg…
Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change - By Henry Bernstein
An Analysis of Standards-based Regulation in the EU Organic Sector, 1991-2007
Against the background of a discussion of recent analyses of capitalist subsumption of agriculture and of neo-liberalism, the paper uses a 'liberal governmentality' framework to trace the development of the EU Regulation on organic agriculture from its adoption in 1991 to its recent repeal and replacement in 2007. The central argument is that regulatory development took the form of a cycle of elaboration, tightening, increasing deviation and fina…
Global value chains
One of the main preoccupations of global value chain (GVC) analysis has been how value chains are governed and by which types of firms. Most current conceptualizations distinguish between different types of GVC governance and see them as effects of given distributions of attributes between firms along chains. The governmentality literature instead sees economic governance primarily in terms of invoked models of practice, and interprets it through…
Governing global value chains
This introductory paper to the special issue on governing global value chains (GVCs) focuses on the concept of governance as the dimension of GVCs that has received the most theoretical and empirical attention to date. After a brief introduction of the GVC concept in relation to the literature on economic globalization, we review the three main interpretations of GVC governance that have been advanced: governance as driving, governance as coordin…
Quality standards, conventions and the governance of global value chains
Convention theory helps refine our understanding of the governance of global value chains through its analysis of 'quality'. In this article, it is argued that global value chains are becoming increasingly 'buyer-driven', even though they are characterized by 'hands-off' forms of co-ordination between 'lead firms' and their immediate suppliers. This is because lead firms have been able to embed complex quality information into widely accepted sta…
Books
Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns. By Paul Strangle Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 464. $49.95 cloth. New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History. By Clive Moore. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. Pp. 274. US$50 paper. The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty. By Mark Peel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 206. $37.95 paper. The Italians in Australia. By Gianfranco Cresciani. Cam…
Global Commodity Chains and African Export Agriculture
The last twenty years or so have seen a new conjuncture in international trade in tropical agricultural products. That conjuncture combines both changes in the organization of the (Northern) manufacturer and consumer segments of the global commodity chains for those products, and in marketing arrangements in their (Southern) countries of origin, associated with structural adjustment and liberalization. This introductory essay provides the context…
Civil Society, Locality and Globalization in Rural Tanzania
In the last decade, much discussion of civil society in LDCs, especially those in Africa, has been based on two sets of normative assumptions, one deriving from the Tocquevillian tradition, the other concerning the nature and implications of globalization. This article criticizes both these approaches, on the basis of a restatement of the Hegel-Young Marx position on civil society. This is then used to compare and contrast the character of rural …
Cooperative Cotton Marketing, Liberalization and 'Civil Society' in Tanzania
This paper describes developments in marketing cooperatives in Tanzania's major cotton-growing area between 1991 and 1997, when they underwent voluntarization, lost state and donor financial support, and (from 1995) faced strong competition from private cotton buyers/ginners. After summarizing the history of marketing cooperatives in the country, the paper distinguishes the main dimensions of the current changes and sums up their outcomes. It the…
Globalisation' and African export crop agriculture
It is commonly agreed that Africa has become increasingly marginalised within the current global economy. However, there are few existing attempts to identify the precise contours of this marginalisation or to explicate the dynamics giving it a precise shape. Against the background of a discussion of theoretical entry points to this problem, as well as of some of its broad quantitative dimensions, this article attempts to develop working hypothes…
Structural Adjustment
Liberalised Development in Tanzania
Contents: Merchantisation of Production and Privatisation of Development in Post-Ujamaa Tanzania: An Introduction / Peter Gibbon -- The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth but not the Mining Rights: The Mining Industry and Accumulation in Tanzania / Chachage Seithy L. Chachage -- When the State Withdraws: Local Development, Politics and Liberalisation in Tanzania / Andrew S.Z Kiondo -- About the authors
Markets, Civil Society and Democracy in Kenya
The studies in this volume provide extended empirical analysis of some of the issues at the heart of current social and political changes and divisions: the outcome on the ground of the long fought-over cereals reforms, the changing nature of the local development arena in the multi-party era, and the polarised relation of the churches to political liberalisation
Structural Adjustment and the Working Poor in Zimbabwe
Seeds for African Peasants
Beyond Capitalism vs. Socialism in Kenya and Tanzania
Prawns and piranhas
The article presents the findings of recent research on three principal areas of prawn fishing in Tanzania: trawler and 'artisanal' fishing off and in the Rufiji Delta respectively, and costal 'artisanal' fishing from Bagamoyo. Adapting a filière-type approach, it analyses the organisation of production, collection, processing and marketing/distribution in the various prawn commodity chains, in terms of their social and technical conditions and d…
Structural Adjustment and Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article reviews discussions concerning some of the main methodological difficulties surrounding the evaluation of structural adjustment policies, before suggesting a procedure to 'save' empirical discussion about new patterns of economic and social relations. In this light it proceeds to examine evidence gathered by the structural adjustment research programme of Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies) on the ch…
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
The African-based authors of this volume provide a series of objective, detailed, factually up-to-date, and theoretically informed studies of reent developments in agriculture, the informal sector, the social sector and 'civil society' in Kenya, Lesotho, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. They analyse the main trends and forces operating in these fields and consider the economic reform programme's impact against this background
Quality standards, conventions and the governance of global value chains
Convention theory helps refine our understanding of the governance of global value chains through its analysis of 'quality'. In this article, it is argued that global value chains are becoming increasingly 'buyer-driven', even though they are characterized by 'hands-off' forms of co-ordination between 'lead firms' and their immediate suppliers. This is because lead firms have been able to embed complex quality information into widely accepted sta…
Governing global value chains
This introductory paper to the special issue on governing global value chains (GVCs) focuses on the concept of governance as the dimension of GVCs that has received the most theoretical and empirical attention to date. After a brief introduction of the GVC concept in relation to the literature on economic globalization, we review the three main interpretations of GVC governance that have been advanced: governance as driving, governance as coordin…
Global value chains
One of the main preoccupations of global value chain (GVC) analysis has been how value chains are governed and by which types of firms. Most current conceptualizations distinguish between different types of GVC governance and see them as effects of given distributions of attributes between firms along chains. The governmentality literature instead sees economic governance primarily in terms of invoked models of practice, and interprets it through…
Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Adjustment
Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).Each of these organisations is active in the field of structural adjustment research.The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies was established in Uppsala in 1962 as a research and documentation centre on Africa for the Nordic countries.It is an independent agency, since 1980 responsible to the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.Traditionally research activities at the Institute reflected th…
The Stem Family in Ireland
The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806-82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the 'patriarchal' family, in which all the sons were…
Globalisation' and African export crop agriculture
It is commonly agreed that Africa has become increasingly marginalised within the current global economy. However, there are few existing attempts to identify the precise contours of this marginalisation or to explicate the dynamics giving it a precise shape. Against the background of a discussion of theoretical entry points to this problem, as well as of some of its broad quantitative dimensions, this article attempts to develop working hypothes…
Arensberg and Kimball revisited
The Origins of Ulster Unionism
A Blighted Harvest
Global Commodity Chains and African Export Agriculture
The last twenty years or so have seen a new conjuncture in international trade in tropical agricultural products. That conjuncture combines both changes in the organization of the (Northern) manufacturer and consumer segments of the global commodity chains for those products, and in marketing arrangements in their (Southern) countries of origin, associated with structural adjustment and liberalization. This introductory essay provides the context…
A failed agenda? African agriculture under structural adjustment with special reference to Kenya and Ghana
On the basis of a close examination of World Bank agricultural reform policies in Kenya and Ghana in the 1980s, the author argues that the structural adjustment agenda has been either aborted or, where implemented, has not had the results intended. In both cases this is because the adjustment problematic assumes the presence of structures and conditions at variance to African realities. As a result, the main beneficiaries of adjustment tend to be…
Lineages of Paternalism
This introductory paper argues that, for most of the period since 1914, paternalism has been the most enduring influence over labour management in large-scale agriculture in Africa and South-East Asia. On the other hand, paternalism appears in a number of variants, with considerable differences in terms of protagonists, degrees of comprehensiveness, emphases and relations to alternative approaches to labour management. After a brief preliminary s…
Markets, Civil Society and Democracy in Kenya
The studies in this volume provide extended empirical analysis of some of the issues at the heart of current social and political changes and divisions: the outcome on the ground of the long fought-over cereals reforms, the changing nature of the local development arena in the multi-party era, and the polarised relation of the churches to political liberalisation
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
The African-based authors of this volume provide a series of objective, detailed, factually up-to-date, and theoretically informed studies of reent developments in agriculture, the informal sector, the social sector and 'civil society' in Kenya, Lesotho, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. They analyse the main trends and forces operating in these fields and consider the economic reform programme's impact against this background
Liberalised Development in Tanzania
Contents: Merchantisation of Production and Privatisation of Development in Post-Ujamaa Tanzania: An Introduction / Peter Gibbon -- The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth but not the Mining Rights: The Mining Industry and Accumulation in Tanzania / Chachage Seithy L. Chachage -- When the State Withdraws: Local Development, Politics and Liberalisation in Tanzania / Andrew S.Z Kiondo -- About the authors
The World Bank and African Poverty, 1973-91
Since 1987-8 the World Bank, together with other donors, has been engaged in a programme of activities known as 'Social Dimensions of Adjustment' (S.D.A.). This is the latest in a line of 'pro-poor' initiatives which the organisation has sponsored over the last two decades. This article analyses the Bank's succession of policies against the background of the changing political and economic world situation, as well as alternative policy agendas
Prawns and piranhas
The article presents the findings of recent research on three principal areas of prawn fishing in Tanzania: trawler and 'artisanal' fishing off and in the Rufiji Delta respectively, and costal 'artisanal' fishing from Bagamoyo. Adapting a filière-type approach, it analyses the organisation of production, collection, processing and marketing/distribution in the various prawn commodity chains, in terms of their social and technical conditions and d…
The State in Northern Ireland, 1921-1972
Labour Management on Contemporary Kenyan Cut Flower Farms
This paper describes the labour management system applied since around 2005 on farms accounting for the bulk of the output of the Kenyan cut flower sector, and provides an analysis of the foundations of this system. Using categories drawn from convention theory, this system is characterized in terms of specific approaches to hiring, training and promotion; labour retention; work organization and worker deployment; payment systems and supervision,…
A New System of Labour Management in African Large-Scale Agriculture
This paper applies a convention theory (CT) approach to the analysis of labour management systems in African large-scale farming. The reconstruction of previous analyses of high-value crop production on large-scale farms in Africa in terms of CT suggests that, since 1980-95, labour management has moved from a 'domestic' to a 'market' system. However, data collected by the authors from a sample of 11 large-scale rose farms in Kenya in 2011 (coveri…
An Analysis of Standards-based Regulation in the EU Organic Sector, 1991-2007
Against the background of a discussion of recent analyses of capitalist subsumption of agriculture and of neo-liberalism, the paper uses a 'liberal governmentality' framework to trace the development of the EU Regulation on organic agriculture from its adoption in 1991 to its recent repeal and replacement in 2007. The central argument is that regulatory development took the form of a cycle of elaboration, tightening, increasing deviation and fina…
A Standard Fit for Neoliberalism
Social scientists and historians writing on techniques of contemporary rule, particularly those influenced by post-Marxist paradigms such as governmentality, have become increasingly preoccupied by the expanding role of standardization and the subjection of an ever-expanding array of spheres of activity to inspection (or self-inspection), audit, and certification. In the course of their investigations, the elements of a common narrative are emerg…
Structural Adjustment and Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article reviews discussions concerning some of the main methodological difficulties surrounding the evaluation of structural adjustment policies, before suggesting a procedure to 'save' empirical discussion about new patterns of economic and social relations. In this light it proceeds to examine evidence gathered by the structural adjustment research programme of Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies) on the ch…
The origins of the Orange Order and the United Irishmen
The paper analyses the social-structural conditions of existence and the consequent political features of two eighteenth-century social movements, the United Irishmen and the Orange Order. Many subsequent historians have identified the United Irishmen as a purely revolutionary movement and the Orange Order as a purely counter-revolutionary movement in the service of the established order. Historical evidence concerning the social, economic and po…
Civil Society, Locality and Globalization in Rural Tanzania
In the last decade, much discussion of civil society in LDCs, especially those in Africa, has been based on two sets of normative assumptions, one deriving from the Tocquevillian tradition, the other concerning the nature and implications of globalization. This article criticizes both these approaches, on the basis of a restatement of the Hegel-Young Marx position on civil society. This is then used to compare and contrast the character of rural …
The Medical Projectors, 1640–1720
Necessity, which is allowed to be the mother of Invention, has so violently agitated the wits of men at this time, that it seems not at all improper, by way of distinction, to call it the Projecting Age.
The origins of the Orange Order and the United Irishmen
The paper analyses the social-structural conditions of existence and the consequent political features of two eighteenth-century social movements, the United Irishmen and the Orange Order. Many subsequent historians have identified the United Irishmen as a purely revolutionary movement and the Orange Order as a purely counter-revolutionary movement in the service of the established order. Historical evidence concerning the social, economic and po…
Arensberg and Kimball revisited
Colonialism and the Great Starvation in Ireland 1845-9
The Origins of Ulster Unionism
The Stem Family in Ireland
The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806-82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the 'patriarchal' family, in which all the sons were…
The State in Northern Ireland, 1921-1972
Lukács
Lukács's Blum Theses (1928) have been celebrated as a turn away from his earlier sectarian utopianism and as an anticipation of the politics of the Popular Front. While sharing with Popular Frontism an emphasis on the merging of democratic and socialist struggles even in modern capitalist societies, Lukács is actually nearer to recent hagiography of the Popular Front than to the original article. For the Theses are essentially an argument for the…
From an institution to a business'? Changes in the British coal industry 1985-9
This paper seeks to explore the main changes in the nationalized British coal industry in the period following the national strike of March 1984 to March 1985, against the backgrounds of a specific interpretation of this strike and its outcome and a view of general developments in the energy sector. The post-strike restructuring is examined with respect to changes in capital structure, the organization of labour-power and surplus extraction, and …
The World Bank and African Poverty, 1973-91
Since 1987-8 the World Bank, together with other donors, has been engaged in a programme of activities known as 'Social Dimensions of Adjustment' (S.D.A.). This is the latest in a line of 'pro-poor' initiatives which the organisation has sponsored over the last two decades. This article analyses the Bank's succession of policies against the background of the changing political and economic world situation, as well as alternative policy agendas
A failed agenda? African agriculture under structural adjustment with special reference to Kenya and Ghana
On the basis of a close examination of World Bank agricultural reform policies in Kenya and Ghana in the 1980s, the author argues that the structural adjustment agenda has been either aborted or, where implemented, has not had the results intended. In both cases this is because the adjustment problematic assumes the presence of structures and conditions at variance to African realities. As a result, the main beneficiaries of adjustment tend to be…
Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Adjustment
Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).Each of these organisations is active in the field of structural adjustment research.The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies was established in Uppsala in 1962 as a research and documentation centre on Africa for the Nordic countries.It is an independent agency, since 1980 responsible to the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.Traditionally research activities at the Institute reflected th…
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
The African-based authors of this volume provide a series of objective, detailed, factually up-to-date, and theoretically informed studies of reent developments in agriculture, the informal sector, the social sector and 'civil society' in Kenya, Lesotho, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. They analyse the main trends and forces operating in these fields and consider the economic reform programme's impact against this background
A Blighted Harvest
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
Structural Adjustment and Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article reviews discussions concerning some of the main methodological difficulties surrounding the evaluation of structural adjustment policies, before suggesting a procedure to 'save' empirical discussion about new patterns of economic and social relations. In this light it proceeds to examine evidence gathered by the structural adjustment research programme of Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies) on the ch…
Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa
Liberalised Development in Tanzania
Contents: Merchantisation of Production and Privatisation of Development in Post-Ujamaa Tanzania: An Introduction / Peter Gibbon -- The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth but not the Mining Rights: The Mining Industry and Accumulation in Tanzania / Chachage Seithy L. Chachage -- When the State Withdraws: Local Development, Politics and Liberalisation in Tanzania / Andrew S.Z Kiondo -- About the authors
Markets, Civil Society and Democracy in Kenya
The studies in this volume provide extended empirical analysis of some of the issues at the heart of current social and political changes and divisions: the outcome on the ground of the long fought-over cereals reforms, the changing nature of the local development arena in the multi-party era, and the polarised relation of the churches to political liberalisation
Structural Adjustment and the Working Poor in Zimbabwe
Seeds for African Peasants
Beyond Capitalism vs. Socialism in Kenya and Tanzania
Prawns and piranhas
The article presents the findings of recent research on three principal areas of prawn fishing in Tanzania: trawler and 'artisanal' fishing off and in the Rufiji Delta respectively, and costal 'artisanal' fishing from Bagamoyo. Adapting a filière-type approach, it analyses the organisation of production, collection, processing and marketing/distribution in the various prawn commodity chains, in terms of their social and technical conditions and d…
Structural Adjustment
Globalisation' and African export crop agriculture
It is commonly agreed that Africa has become increasingly marginalised within the current global economy. However, there are few existing attempts to identify the precise contours of this marginalisation or to explicate the dynamics giving it a precise shape. Against the background of a discussion of theoretical entry points to this problem, as well as of some of its broad quantitative dimensions, this article attempts to develop working hypothes…
Political science (27 works) · Economics (26 works) · Politics (13 works) · Development economics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Agriculture (8 works) · Geography (8 works)